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For georgia pacific green bay our latest readings in Philippine literature, particularly old short stories by Filipino writers Mel U of The Reading georgia pacific green bay Life and I have decided to read together and invite others to join us, our featured author is Francisco Arcellana (Sept. 6, 1916-Aug. 1, 2002), who was honored as National Artist in Literature in the Philippines in 1990.
Arcellana’s complete name is Zacarias Eugene Francisco Quino Arcellana. He comes from a big family, being the fourth of 18 children. He himself georgia pacific green bay went on to have a big family with six children, georgia pacific green bay one of whom, Juaniyo, is also an essayist, poet, and fictionist. As a writer, Arcellana credited American authors Erskine Caldwell and Whit Burnett as his influences.
Understandably, a large brood is the cast in two of Arcellana’s short stories I have read--"The Mats” and “The Flowers of May”. And they are no separate set. It seems that The Mats is a sequel to The Flowers of May (and it is a fortunate thing I was able to read the latter first).
The Flowers of May (8 pages, 1951) is told from the perspective of Paking, one of the 14 children who tried to explain georgia pacific green bay to the grief caused by the death of a child (the dead Victoria) who lived long enough georgia pacific green bay to form an attachment georgia pacific green bay with her parents. For the record, I am not sure if Paking is a boy or a girl, but from the scenes georgia pacific green bay in the story, he could very well be a boy since the girls are “out in the rain”. georgia pacific green bay Sixteen-year old Victoria, a singing flower girl for nine years, is not the only one who died in the family. georgia pacific green bay “Victoria is Father’s first real, and as it turns out, only loss. Josefine who died before her died in early infancy and Concepcion who died after her was stillborn. Victoria died and we buried her and Father has not said her name once or even spoken of her.”
Paking is describing two types of regular scenes--one is what happens in the house every May and the second is what happens in the house everyday and makes a bit of comparison between prior to Victoria’s death and thereafter. He subtly makes a comparison as well as to how his parents separately cope with her demise--his mother trying to make things appear normal georgia pacific green bay and his father acting abnormally. In the end, the sight of flowers, especially lilies, brought by his sisters undid their father and makes him admit his grief.
In not so many words, Arcellana clearly describes how grief affects us all. In his story, the climax georgia pacific green bay is the end. “It is as terrible as the naked terror stark in Mother’s eyes and deep as the new knowledge georgia pacific green bay and first and final and only wisdom georgia pacific green bay that we have just now begun to share. So this is death. So this is what is means to die. And for the first time since she died and we buried her, we learn to accept the fact of Victoria’s death finally, we know at least that Victoria is dead--really and truly dead.”
The second story, The Mats (5 pages, 1938), sounds like a sequel to the first story because the same deceased children were mentioned; however the living children and the parents have different names. This one also sound like it happened many years later when the children are grown up and many of them are studying, georgia pacific green bay getting ready for university.
It tells, again in that lyrical prose-poetic form that Arcellana is so good at, about how Jaime, the father, brought home mats from one of his periodic inspection trips. Each one in the family georgia pacific green bay now has a mat with his/her name and birthstone on it. But there are three extra mats in the set--one for each of the deceased children, Josefina, Victoria, and Concepcion--which spark an argument between the parents, with the father demanding, “Do you think I’d forgotten? Do you think I had forgotten them? Do you think I could forget them? Is it fair to forget them? Would it be just to disregard them?”
You know, apart from the names of the dead children, that overwhelming feeling of grief of the father and that attitude of the mother to move on with life and make the best of everything from The Flowers of May is so consistent with The Mats I might have been reading one novella rather than two separate short stories. The mats, the three remaining ones, are literal representations of sorrow. On the bright side, they also represent strong filial relationships that is so characteristic of Filipino families. "The names which were with infinite slowness revealed, seemed strange georgia pacific green bay and stranger still; the colors not bright but deathly dull; the separate letters georgia pacific green bay spelling out the n